


The Ice Maiden

by thegrendel



Category: Original Work
Genre: Aircraft Carrier, Battle, F/M, Ice Maiden, Naval Combat, Project Habakkuk, Snow Sex, WWII, battleship Tirpitz, ice ships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 13:44:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15268734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegrendel/pseuds/thegrendel
Summary: German submarine wolf packs were slaughtering Allied shipping in 1942.An effective way of escorting convoys to and from England was desperatelyneeded. There just weren't enough destroyers available, and there wasa critical shortage of aircraft carriers. What to do?Use icebergs as the core of unsinkable aircraft carriers. There was a plan in the worksto actually do this: Project Habakkuk. In the fact, none of these carriers were built. But,what if they had been?This is a tale of alternate history . . .





	The Ice Maiden

**Author's Note:**

> This was my first attempt at Alternate History. Consider it the first  
> installment of a novel. The background of the story is true.
> 
>  
> 
> German submarine wolf packs were slaughtering Allied shippping in 1942.  
> An effective way of escorting convoys to and from England was desperately  
> needed. There just weren't enough destroyers available, and there was  
> a critical shortage of aircraft carriers. What to do?
> 
>  
> 
> Project Habakkuk.
> 
> Inspired by an inspiration of mad inventor Geoffrey Pyke, engineers built  
> and tested ship-like prototype ice structures in lakes in Alberta, Canada,  
> in 1943. The idea proved feasible, more or less. Ships made of solid ice,  
> with suitable reinforcing members made of more conventional materials,  
> would be effectively unsinkable by torpedoes or shellfire. However, such  
> vessels had a couple of major drawbacks. They would have been extremely  
> expensive to build, the equivalent of $100,000,000 or more each, a  
> fortune by 1943 standards. They also had an unfortunate tendency to  
> gradually melt away or even vaporize in warm weather.
> 
> By early 1944, the Allies had won the Battle of the Atlantic, and there  
> was no longer a need for unsinkable aircraft carriers. The Habakkuks  
> never sailed. But what if they had?

At a stately six knots, the H.M.S. Indefeasible plowed through the rolling  
swells of the Arctic Sea off the coast of Norway. She was an experimental  
ship, one of the first of the new Habakkuk-class aircraft carriers carved  
out of chunks of the Greenland icecap. She was an iceberg shaped into  
the semblance of a ship's hull by jets of superheated steam. An iceberg  
stiffened and reinforced with inventor Geoffrey Pike's miracle material,  
_Pykrete_ \-- really only a frozen mixture of water and sawdust, but  
which boasted many of the useful properties of construction steel. An  
iceberg fitted out with triple 2,500 horsepower Liberty Ship engines. A  
fighting and freight-carrying iceberg. Her crew called her the Ice Maiden.

Tromsö lay ahead, about 150 miles to starboard. It was March of 1944,  
and there were a thousand newly-built up-gunned Sherman Firefly tanks  
and 600 Lend-Lease P-40 fighters aboard -- destined for Stalin's armies,  
by way of Murmansk. The weather forecast called for blustery winds,  
with a possibility of heavy snow later in the evening. It was sleeting  
lightly and visibility was down to 50 feet.

Jud Kirsch unbuttoned his military parka as he stepped indoors and muscled  
the door shut against the resistance of a frigid wind gust. Straight from  
the North Pole that damn storm must be blowing. At least they had issued  
cold-weather headgear with fur earflaps, rather than those less-than-useless  
Army Air Force regulation billed caps. He stopped at his commanding  
officer's desk and languidly saluted. "Captain Judson Kirsch reporting  
as ordered."

"I'm an engineer, not a flipping soldier," he repeated for what must  
have been the twentieth time. "Sure, I know more about the P-40 and what  
keeps her in the air than any of those glorified flyboys and jumped-up  
mechanics at the Curtiss Wright plant in Burbank. But, damn it all,  
why did they have to stick me on this motorized ice cube?"

"You sure as hell aren't much of a soldier, flipping or otherwise,"  
Colonel Smythers snapped back. "We requisitioned you for your mechanical  
knowhow, not your military skills, that's for damned certain. Now, shut up  
your whining and enjoy the 36-hour furlough topside. I understand you've  
been making eyes at that nursey broad, Malice something-or-other. She  
has to be as frigid as the superstructure of this damned ship, if my  
information sources are correct, and they usually are. Lots of luck with  
that one, and don't freeze your pecker off. Dismissed."

Kirsch gave a sloppy salute, nonchalantly pivoted, and walked out the  
door of the drafty administrative building. Imagine, living and working in  
Quonset huts on the deck of a tossing and heaving iceberg. Then stomping  
your way through snow-drifted paths toward the holds and workshops. Ice  
caverns, really. Well, at least it had one major advantage. There were  
plenty of hidden places for a tryst or rendezvous, assuming you could  
find a willing partner, that is. Well, there was always Major Paige,  
commander of the on-board nurse contingent. Mary Alice was too big a  
mouthful for her close friends, what few of them there were, and "Malice"  
was probably more apt anyhow. She did have a coldly imperious manner,  
not to mention a rather sharp tongue. As well as dangerous curves.

 

"Close the damned door!"

The coal-fired stoves in the aft mess hall didn't quite manage to  
compensate for the frigid gusts of arctic air that slammed in every time  
someone entered.

"Sorry, mates," he apologized. He looked around.

There was Malice herself, in all her icy majesty, sitting by herself in  
the officers' section. Five-foot eleven of sculpted femininity, and a  
scowl that could give Medusa a run for her money. Scowl, what scowl? She  
was looking in his direction and smiling. Motioning him over.

"Major Paige?"

"My friends call me Malice, not that I have a malicious bone in my body,  
ha, ha. Grab a seat, Jud, old fellow, and plop your skinny behind down."  
With a negligent gesture of her hand, she indicated an open spot next  
to her.

Had she been drinking on duty? That might account for her jolly  
familiarity. Nurse Malice, the Snow Queen, the resident Ice Maiden of  
the Ice Maiden? Could it be?

Someone was stuffing the jukebox with coins, and the jumpy, discordant  
sounds of Spike Jones' "Ve heil r-r-right in der fuehrer's face" began  
rasping from the loudspeaker.

"Sarsaparilla soda for the lady," he told the server, a sergeant by his  
insignia. "Coffee for me. Bleak. Sorry, I mean black."

"I've been so lonely," she said.

Sometimes one thing really does lead to another. They walked out of the  
mess hall into an arctic gale. Her arm snaked around his waist in a  
distinctly non-comradely fashion. A squeeze led to a kiss. Then a cold,  
cold hand found its way down into his pants. "Just checking if you like  
me," she said as she inventoried his equipment.

There was a storage bunker off the beaten path. It was actually just a  
hollowed-out space in a snow bank with a lockable wooden door mounted  
on two-by-fours rammed into the ice -- really only a cave of sorts. But  
it did provide shelter and privacy. He fumbled for the key.

She had stepped out of her skirt, and he managed to tug her military-issue  
underwear down several inches . . . but she was in tears. "I can't, I just  
can't. I want to so badly, and heaven knows I desire you, but I can't go  
any farther. Please, please just hold me."

He hugged her to him, and tried to make her goosebumps go away by  
caressing her mostly naked behind. What a hell of a time for her to  
freeze up. It was, in fact, freezing in there. Time to blow the joint.

"Walk me home."

By "home," she meant the women's Bachelor Officers' Quarters, he presumed.  
He gallantly offered her a bent elbow to hook onto.

There were distant booms as they stepped out into a driving blizzard.  
A sudden brilliant flash set the sky on fire.

"Gunfire and star shells. Damn! Looks like the whole bloody German navy  
found us. We're in for it now."

There was a strange look on her face. She pulled him back into  
the shelter, then unbuttoned his fly and quickly took him into her  
mouth. Damn! She turned around, and shrugged out of her skirt, then  
slipped off khaki woolen underwear. Facing away, she bent over and  
presented her bare posterior to him.

"Do me, Jud. Now. I'm so hot. Hot! The heat inside me! The heat of  
battle!"

He held onto her ample hips as icy marble buttocks rebounded against  
his crotch and her inner fire clutched desperately at him. She screamed  
out orgasm after orgasm as the klaxons wailed General Quarters. The  
freight train roar of 15-inch shells passing overhead momentarily drowned  
out all other sounds. A wash of frigid salt water from the spume of a  
near-miss rattled icy rain on the corrugated tin roof of their makeshift  
shelter. The dragon herself, the battleship Tirpitz, had snuck up on  
the Ice Maiden and it was going to be a death match.


End file.
